Re: <nettime> Stormy weather? Daniele Ganser edit

D’Eramo, quoted by Michael Guggenheim <migug@bluewin.ch>:

I find these now-common disclaimers fascinating:

And <i>Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine</i> doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict.

This shows that what Putin has been doing is so terrible that even his defenders* feel obligated to at least acknowledge as much. The reason seems to be that if/when they're accused of being apologists for genocide they can always go back to this tepid parenthetical remark as proof that they disapproved of the worst of it, and said so. But this is usually one sentence fragment drowned out by thousands of words in which they blame NATO (or Biden, or US defense contractors, or whoever) for the whole thing. It's not unlike corporate CEOs who feel obligated to say that they "accept full responsibility" for mass layoffs--a meaningless platitude.

If the invasion is "unjustifiable" it seems like they could devote a paragraph or two to that, rather than to some Rube Goldberg-ish tale of how someone else forced Putin to bomb hospitals and slaughter civilians

(* Not all his defenders. You can identify the most hardcore of them by their refusal to even acknowledge that the Russians are doing anything wrong in Ukraine.)

--Dave.

Dave Mandl
david.mandl@gmail.com
davem@wfmu.org
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